We’re just a part of the cycle of life in the divine chain of digestion. Playing in the garden, the children plucked us and forgot to put us in water. For them, all of life is a game, while death is just a short intermission between acts. But look at us: we’re cooling down, we’re being forgotten. We lie motionless on the floor and the lines of roles we haven’t played fall silent behind the stage. The pitiful sounds of lovers’ voices, searching for each other in the darkness, reach our ears, the clink of handcuffs on philosophers’ wrists in solitary confinement, and the righteous, innocent as children, laugh, watching as we are cast from the stratosphere. “God,” they say, “is like the light of the full moon travelling along the surface of the earth. Only those who know how to wait will be open to his love.”

Where are you, Mari? Find me. When I think about you, my heart bashes around my chest like a madman in a soft-padded room. If only there were some device by which to lessen your influence over me. I would pay handsomely for it. I could tell you everything I wanted. Nothing will ever stop me dreaming about you. Even death. Even you. It’s impossible to conceive that you might not be in my life. The cosmos is disintegrating, left without one of its most fundamental forces: gravity, or electromagnetic interaction.

With unimaginable effort, I rip you from my dreams, and, cupping your head in my hands, doggedly destroy all the other pictures that accompany your image. I once wrote to you that you wouldn’t recognise me. Now, I’m no longer certain I remember your face. The efforts I expend to conquer unconsciousness lead to several old dreams, swimming out of oblivion on proud caravels; they seem connected to you, somehow—I clutch at hair, face, hands, body, and sure, jerky movements. Achingly familiar. Yours. But they only exacerbate my deplorable situation. They lead me forward for a long while and then leave me on the edge of sleep. Alone. There, in this vision, you want to leave me. Abandoning the old house, you laugh, hiding sadness in your smile. I’m powerless before you, but I have power over the world in which we live. The hateful elevator taking you away descends with a groan like it’s heading straight to hell.

It stops halfway. When you, extracting from yourself the stinger of claustrophobia, leave its metallic embrace and approach the door to the street, it becomes a stone wall, and its metal handle, handcuffs. With serpentine cunning and cold tenderness, they wrap around your wrists. Because this is what I desire. I won’t let you go, not now. You won’t realise for a long time that you won ages ago. The demons, inhabitants of the grey city in my head, dropped dead, poisoned by the chemical weapons of your psyche. And the weaker you are, the greater your power over me. Hear my words. In rage, there is obedience; in a terrible display of strength, tenderness; in a scream, silence. The more pain we are dealt, the more fiercely we love. All of this, however, is no justification for inaction. Fight. Your submissiveness has inflicted a mortal wound on the credibility of our book. You have to fix it.